Enabling Significant Changes on the Horizon

Crowley Maritime Corporation is a U.S.-owned-and-operated marine solutions, transportation and logistics company providing services in domestic and international markets. Crowley is a complex organization made up of six business units with approximately 6,300 employees. The company operates in multiple countries and generates over $2.5 billion in annual revenue.

Crowley recognized that its acquisition, technology transformation and business transformation strategies would involve a great deal of change. Further, leadership recognized that the organization’s bias toward immediate action, while important in achieving company goals, made change even more difficult. They resolved to invest in making change happen more easily and quickly throughout the organization.

Implementing a new approach to managing change

Crowley selected Prosci as its chosen change management methodology due to its reputation, results-oriented approach, and large set of ready-to-use tools and templates. Crowley’s executive team attended the Prosci-led Change Management Sponsor Briefing. This one-day workshop brought momentum and credibility to the change leadership initiative. Shortly thereafter, a core team met with Prosci advisors for a Strategic Alignment Workshop, where they conducted an audit of the organization’s current level of change management maturity, defined milestones and targets for increasing maturity over time, and co-created a strategic roadmap for change leadership.

With buy-in from leadership and a new team formed, Crowley moved forward with the change management strategy outlined in the workshop.

Building awareness of the need for change

The Change Leadership (CL) department used a variety of creative and intentional campaigns to build an awareness and understanding of change management throughout the organization. These campaigns and activities included:

• A video distributed on the organization’s internal social media platform that featured senior leaders holding up signs to explain the letters in the ADKAR^® Model
• A “change leadership by the numbers” postcard delivered to all employee desks, visually and humorously highlighting key information about Crowley’s change leadership initiative and basic change management research data from Prosci
• A series of micro-learning webinars on basic or intermediate change management topics made available monthly to all interested employees
• A Change Gallery Open House exhibit to show all senior leaders and members of IT participating in change projects what change management deliverables look like

A key component of the CL team’s success was due to the enthusiasm of the Crowley leadership team, who knew the value of change management and was eager to help communicate it throughout the organization. An average of 200 people attended each micro-learning webinar, and teams requested “change briefings” to learn more and to take the big picture back to their groups.

Applying change management to key initiatives

Leadership and the CL team selected four projects for initial application of the Prosci 3-Phase Process. The goal was to ensure better outcomes for these key must-win projects and to demonstrate the tangible benefits of applying change management. The four projects were high-risk and also high-impact to the organization. They included:

• A large technology transformation for terminal operations
• A human capital management strategy
• End-user experience adopting new technology
• A liner logistics growth strategy

Overall, these four initiatives impacted all 6,300 Crowley employees.

Providing change management training

With the goal of increasing Crowley’s overall change capability, individuals in key roles throughout Crowley participated in tailored change management training. Crowley’s senior leaders, IT directors, project managers and leaders responsible for a change each attended role-based change management programs. The Prosci License enabled the CL team to tailor the style and language of the training to align with unique aspects of Crowley’s culture.

In support of the high-risk, high-impact projects where they applied the project-level change management methodology, the CL team initiated formal training for the people that these projects impacted. They delivered customized modular training for people managers, as well as Prosci’s Delivering Project Results Workshop.

Supporting change leadership community of practice

The CL team also invested in supporting the trained change leaders in the organization. Eleven employees completed the three-day Prosci Change Management Certification Program, while another 300 received a condensed version of the methodology based on their specific roles in the organization. To support these groups, the CL team utilizes Crowley’s internal social media as a way to engage and communicate with this group and the full organization.

Results

Just one year into their aggressive four-year plan for implementing an organizational change capability, the Crowley leadership and CL team exceeded expectations: 

• Elevated employee satisfaction in handling of change initiatives from 72% rating to 88%
• Grew organizational change maturity score from 1.8 to 3.0 (on 5-point scale) in a single year
• Gained buy-in from senior leaders and from employees across the organization for change capability
• Expanded the application of change management to additional changes across the organization
• Established a virtual community of practice for Crowley change leaders

While all the projects are still in progress, Crowley is confident that their change leadership efforts will help ensure that results are delivered on each of the targeted strategic initiatives and make it easier for employees to adopt the new behaviors critical for success. These successes will enable Crowley to exceed its goals for change maturity to become a more change-responsive organization.